The politics of fashion and beauty in Africa

Feature article | 37
“These Girls’ Fashion is Sick!”:
An African City and the Geography
of Sartorial Worldliness
Grace Adeniyi Ogunyankin
They are the noble savages, staring out from coffee table books. Africa
Adorned. The Last Nomads. Backdrops and extras for Vogue fashion
shoots. Stock ingredients for tourist brochures … They are the myth
of tribal splendour. Everything about them is foreign … Their “timeless
culture” is the stuff of children’s books, of Western fantasies. They are
everyone’s dream of people untouched by modernity. (Patel, 2010: 45;
emphasis in original)
What happens when black womanhood, black femininity, black women’s
spaces, places and poetics are “Not on the margins”? …. if these
conceptual and political differences are not simply cast as marginal,
they do not have to replicate marginality. (McKittrick, 2006: 134-135;
emphasis in original)
Introduction
As an urban feminist geographer with a research interest in African cities,
I was initially pleased when the web series, An African City, debuted in
2014. The series was released on YouTube and also available online at www.
anafricancity.tv. Within the first few weeks of its release, An African City had
over one million views. Created by Nicole Amarteifio, a Ghanaian who grew
up in London and the United States, An African City is offered as the African
answer to Sex and the City, and as a counter-narrative to popular depictions
of African women as poor, unfashionable, unsuccessful and uneducated. The
show centers around the lives of five upper-middle-class repatriated women:
Nana Yaa, Makena, Zainab, Ngozi and Sade. The characters are in their midto-late
twenties and have decided to settle in Accra, Ghana, after having spent